Assassin's Creed III: Deluxe Edition

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Ubisoft.

The Assassin's Creed franchise envelopes players in a very intriguing storyline. Far in the future, the world is about to be destroyed by the sun. Some faction from the distant past realized this and started making preparations for it. Desmond, the main character of the series, his father, and some other friends, are working hard to figure out how to save the earth from this destruction before the Templars get their way. Through the use of an Anima device, Desmond can travel back into the memories of his ancestors who were part of a brotherhood of assassins. It is into those memories, as well as into Desmond's present, that the player is transported, reliving surprisingly accurate historical events.

In Assassin's Creed III, Desmond and his band are on a quest to retrieve another key element of the puzzle to help them save earth. This time, from their base of operations somewhere in a cave in the northeastern United States, Desmond relives the memories of a half Native American ancestor who should somehow give Desmond and his team clues about the whereabouts of their next prize. Desmond's ancestor, Connor, joins the assassin's brotherhood on a mission of revenge against a group of Templars who burned his village to the ground and killed his mother.

Without giving too much away, the storyline follows the founding of the United States of America starting from a few years before the revolution kicks off. You get to meet a bunch of historical icons and even run missions for George Washington himself. That's beside participating in the Boston Tea Party and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Not bad for a half-native assassin. Of course, you don't always fight for the rebels. Connor's interests are in protecting his tribe and their lands, and that means fighting against a lot of people.

In a way, it is kind of intriguing the way the story stays away from declaring one side right and one side wrong. The narrative really made me start to think about the people involved in that conflict in a much different way than I was used to. Learning about the revolutionary war growing up, I recognize the big names, the places, and the battles, but I'd never considered the impact of either side or the third order effects. The fact that completing each sequence of memories brings Desmond one step closer to saving the world brings it all together on a much larger stage.

The storyline in compelling and well scripted. The voice acting is great, with the exception of Connor himself, maybe. But the story aside, Assassin's Creed III also brings about a lot of revolutionary new features in graphics design, tesselation, rendering, and anti-aliasing that make it look and feel splendid. I also have some complaints about some of the new graphics, and the console port look and feel of the gameplay. Let's go inside and take a look at some of those now.

Comments

I enjoyed the game to a certain extent but I found that single player is far too long due to the fact it's padded with silly side quests like collecting feathers, almanac pages, liberation missions etc. I'm surprised that you didn't mention the clunky, cumbersome, awkward, slow, difficult to understand, annoying & pedantic (I could go on) trading system which tests the player patience to the limit. Latching onto climbable structures when you don't mean to is nothing new as it is part & parcel of every AC game & still just as annoying, you'd have thought that after all these years this would've been ironed out. The game has more bugs than a flea bitten dog & the patch from Ubi (for single player) does nothing to iron any of this out. If you can look past all of this & don't mind being frustrated by the trading system it's not a bad game at all.